Defining TSM tape and disk storage pools

The Archive Node writes to a disk storage pool. To archive content to tape, you must configure the disk storage pool to move content to a tape storage pool.

About this task

For a TSM server, you must define a tape storage pool and a disk storage pool within Tivoli Storage Manager. After the disk pool is defined, create a disk volume and assign it to the disk pool. A tape pool is not required if your TSM server uses disk‐only storage.

You must complete a number of steps on your TSM server before you can create a tape storage pool. (Create a tape library and at least one drive in the tape library. Define a path from the server to the library and from the server to the drives, and then define a device class for the drives.) The details of these steps can vary depending upon the hardware configuration and storage requirements of the site. For more information, see the TSM documentation.

The following set of instructions illustrates the process. You should be aware that the requirements for you site may be different depending on the requirements of your deployment. For configuration details and for instructions, see the TSM documentation.

Note: You must log onto the server with administrative privileges and use the dsmadmc tool to execute the following commands.

Steps

Create a tape library.

define library tapelibrary libtype=scsi

Where tapelibrary is an arbitrary name chosen for the tape library, and the value of libtype can vary depending upon the type of tape library.

You might want to configure an additional drive or drives, depending upon your hardware configuration. (For example, if the TSM server is connected to a Fibre Channel switch that has two inputs from a tape library, you might want to define a drive for each input.)

SGWSDiskPool is the name of the Archive Node’s disk pool. You can select any name for the disk storage pool (as long as the name uses the syntax conventions expected by the TSM).

description is a description of the storage pool that can be displayed on the TSM server using the query stgpool command. For example, "Disk storage pool for the Archive Node."

maximum_file_size forces objects larger than this size to be written directly to tape, rather than being cached in the disk pool. It is recommended to set maximum_file_size to 10 GB.

nextstgpool=SGWSTapePool refers the disk storage pool to the tape storage pool defined for the Archive Node.

percent_high sets the value at which the disk pool begins to migrate its contents to the tape pool. It is recommended to set percent_high to 0 so that data migration begins immediately

percent_low sets the value at which migration to the tape pool stops. It is recommended to set percent_low to 0 to clear out the disk pool.

On a TSM server, create a disk volume (or volumes) and assign it to the disk pool.

define volume SGWSDiskPoolvolume_name formatsize=size

SGWSDiskPool is the disk pool name.

volume_name is the full path to the location of the volume (for example, /var/local/arc/stage6.dsm) on the TSM server where it writes the contents of the disk pool in preparation for transfer to tape.

size is the size, in MB, of the disk volume.

For example, to create a single disk volume such that the contents of a disk pool fill a single tape, set the value of size to 200000 when the tape volume has a capacity of 200 GB.

However, it might be desirable to create multiple disk volumes of a smaller size, as the TSM server can write to each volume in the disk pool. For example, if the tape size is 250 GB, create 25 disk volumes with a size of 10 GB (10000) each.

The TSM server preallocates space in the directory for the disk volume. This can take some time to complete (more than three hours for a 200 GB disk volume).